Echoes in Eternity

"Take a people who are able and strong. Place them in the wealthiest land on earth. Surround them with unparalleled opportunity. Then pay them not to work, not to strive, not to achieve. Pay them to accept nonproductivity as a way of life. Agree to subsidize their families with food, shelter, health care, and money if the fathers will leave.

Do this for two or three generations and see what you produce. You will have a people who are unmotivated and dependent, whose hopes and dreams rise no higher than their subsidies - a people who have lost the work ethic, who have learned that others will take responsibility for them and who therefore assert little discipline or control over their own lives. You will have emasculated their men, making them expendable and unnecessary to their families' existence. You will have created a generation of prideless, fatherless youth who believe that receiving and taking is better than working and investing. And when you have seen the hope disappear from the eyes of the young, you can be sure you have developed an effective formula for the destruction of a people. We call it welfare." - Robert Lupton

Walter Williams had some good points to make about how the welfare state has helped destroy the black American family.

“[T]he welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, the harshest Jim Crow laws and racism could not have done, namely break up the black family."

Mark Steyn has a good piece on the problem this country faces with entitlements... particularly a "sense of entitlement."

I like to think that upon arrival in this great republic I assimilated pretty quickly. Within four or five months, I was saying “zee” and driving on the right more often than not. But it took me longer to get the hang of the word “entitlement.” You don’t hear it in political discussions in most of the rest of the West, even in Canada. There’s talk of “social programs” and “benefits” and “welfare,” but not of “entitlements.” I knew the term only in its psychological use — “sense of entitlement” — in discussions of narcissistic personality disorder and whatnot.

Once I’d been apprised of its political definition, I liked it even less. “Entitlements” are unrepublican: They are contemptuous of the most basic principle of responsible government — that a parliament cannot bind its successor. Which is what entitlements do, to catastrophic effect.
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“Entitlement commitments are not debts,” wrote John Hinderaker of the blog Powerline. “Congress can wipe them out simply by repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

That’s technically true in the same sense that it’s technically true Congress can wipe out a lot of our debts — or at any rate our debtors — by nuking Beijing. But is either likely to happen under any scenario this side of total societal meltdown? Indeed, I find it easier to imagine economic collapse, secession, civil war, Mad Max on I-95, cannibal gangs of the undocumented preying on gated communities of upscale gays, etc., than any combination of House, Senate, and president “repealing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid.”

Which is where we came in. Whether or not government “entitlements” are debts, they very quickly become a psychological disorder — and a “sense of entitlement” is harder to dislodge than almost anything else. Government entitlement breeds psychological entitlement breeds a utopia of myopia. I don’t mean merely in the sense that polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans still feel entitled to their entitlements, but in a more profound way.
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John Hinderaker is right. We can, in theory, repeal the entitlements. Repealing the sense of entitlement is the tricky part.

I see a lot of charities doing many good things in our inner cities, from urban housing development to cheap groceries. But until this country tackles the sense of entitlement that has crept into our hearts and eliminates the destructive entitlement policies that have helped that mentality to take root while also destroying our economy, those charities will continue to merely spoon water out of the Titanic's hold. Unless those moral and political leaks are repaired, we will continue to sink. It starts with repentance... unfortunately, our socio-political landscape is lacking prophets.

I don't drink coffee, but I know plenty who do. As many people are aware, there is a big push in the coffee industry to promote "fair trade" coffee which supposedly gives higher wages to the poor workers who produce it in Third World countries. The problem is, that's not really the case. Furthermore, as Jay Richards pointed out in his great book Money, Greed, and God, fair trade tends to prop up industries beyond their natural free market equilibrium, which will eventually result in too many people in those coffee-growing countries investing in the coffee market. Fair trade coffee is just one more example of a "progressive" idea that is meant to make people feel good about themselves while actually doing little good or even doing harm to those it purports to help. If you have previously supported fair trade coffee, please reconsider!

This looks like a promising book.

Another good post by Pastor Wilson, this time on giving thanks for everything good that God has given us via technology and wealth.

The birth of the modern age, measured in terms of conveniences, technology, wealth, medical advances, and so on was largely a legacy of the Reformation. But the Bible teaches that whenever a gift is given, there will immediately be a temptation arising in our hearts to steal the glory and gratitude that should go to God alone. That temptation will say, fundamentally, that we owe none of this to God, and that we did it all ourselves. That attitude is what we call the Enlightenment. That is modernist hubris, technocratic arrogance, and purblind puffery.
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This is the sinful pattern. God gives wealth, man takes credit for himself. If someone else later on comes along and blames man for creating all this wealth, and demands that we have ourselves a little "social justice" around here -- and what a wretched little phrase social justice is -- he is just creating an extra layer of sedimentary silliness. And by this point, we don't need any extra layers.

The Enlightenment is not to be credited with Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Smith's discovery that no one man is capable of manufacturing a pin, Newton's discovery of what objects in motion tend to do, or Watts' admirable divvying up of energy into units of horsepower. God gave us all those things. We must thank God for them.

Seeing the inevitable abuses of wealth that follow after a humanistic grabbing of credit for it, and reacting away from the whole thing entirely, is simply foolish. If it is a good thing, as my smart phone is a good thing, then God is to be thanked. If it is a sinful thing, like thinking that man does things he can't do, then we should abandon our folly, repent of our sins, and return to the gospel of grace that undergirds all God's statutes and laws. And if you don't know where those passages are, you can look them up on your phone.

This is one of the best discussions I've heard around the topic of combating poverty.

Doug Wilson has an excellent post on the natural and Biblical progression from the freedom brought by the Spirit of God to economic freedom for all mankind.

Everything about God’s purposes and plans converge upon liberty. This is the Spirit of jubilee. Proclaim liberty throughout the land, which cannot be done apart from the gospel. And when the gospel is preached in power, men are set free.
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And when these men are set free from their sins, these freed men in turn set their markets free. Slaves have never built a free economic system, and they never will. They always build tyrannies, with the people enslaved to their lusts and their masters at the bottom, and their masters enslaved to their lusts at the top.

One of the fundamental confusions that drives much of our discussion of American free markets is the confusion between businesses and markets. Being pro-free-market is not at all the same thing as being pro-General-Electric (say). Over the course of our history, American markets have only been comparatively free, but the Spirit of God is nowhere near done with us. We have been free compared to Cuba and Sweden, but we are not yet free compared to the standards of a postmill biblical republic.

The free market consists of the rules of the game. Someone who is pro-free-market thinks that clipping should be clipping for all teams, holding should be holding, and so forth. Someone who is pro-business only sees the rules of the game as one instrument among many that can be used to advance the self-interest of their favored team. Their only rule is winning. Now in the American game of free market football, our refs still make plenty of bad calls, with more than a few of them on the take. But the rules of the game are (still) somewhat recognizable.

Enter the Jim Wallis types, who point out all the cheating, and want to solve the problem by making it legal to bribe the refs and, for good measure, to make it legal for the refs to threaten the wife and children of any of the players. If pressed, he might even cite the Jubilee laws of the Old Testament, apropos of nothing.

So it is hard to determine which is sillier—professed Christians manufacturing chains with Lev. 25:10 stamped on every link, or atheistic Austrian economists pulling theories of true liberty out of the unregenerate heart of man. The former tries, using confused appeals to Augustine, to make the Spirit a slave trader, and the latter tries, using confused appeals to the Scottish Enlightenment, to make the devil the Lord of Manumission.

Organizations like this one and this one give me hope that Christians will finally get a clue and (hopefully) lead the West in properly attacking the problem of poverty and hunger.

This is a really interesting discussion between Robert George and Cornell West.

John Stossel has a great piece on the importance of property rights in growing and sustaining wealth and prosperity. It all comes down to the simplicity of having one's own mailing address... something Americans take for granted. I have an address because I own a plot of land in Crystal, Minnesota. As Stossel points out, because of that, I can borrow money for investment and any business I start out of my home can be legally recognized. In developing countries, due to the lack of rule of law, property rights are either non-existent or capricious in nature. You may live in a home, but nothing is legally stopping the government or an individual from claiming that home for himself**. That is why if poor countries are ever going to begin to prosper, they need property rights. And to get those rights, they need a stable rule of law. And to get that rule of law, tyrants and dictators need to be removed and struggling democracies need to be strengthened. Which is why a simple government military intervention can sometimes do more long-term good in one day in a particular country than all of the Western charties can in a year. Or it can do much harm.

** Of course, in this country, we're steadily losing our property rights. Because of serious abuses of eminent domain, American bodies of government (local or federal) have been taking people's homes and property from them without consent and sometimes without proper compensation.

[O]ne of the great contributions of the first Christendom was the development of free markets. And I would want to maintain that one of the great results of the next Christendom will be the restoration and preservation of them. Free markets are the economic expression of the apostolic teaching that we are to serve one another in love.

Wealth is the ability to summon the labor of another, and to enjoy the fruit of that labor. Back in the olden time, the opulent could do this by owning a bunch of slaves, or servants with no options, which meant that one man's wealth meant another man's lack of it. In such settings, wealth and poverty really were a zero sum game -- if one person got a larger piece of pie, then somebody else got a smaller piece.

But in a system of free markets, God has given us the gift of being timeshare servants, and the privilege of being timeshare bosses. A young woman can save up her tips waiting tables, and go out with her friends to another restaurant and be waited on. We can do this because of division of labor. One guy makes roast beef sandwiches for 8 hours a day, and I can rent his service for 45 seconds of that time. Again, back in another time, getting a roast beef sandwich would have taken half the day. "In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37" (The Rational Optimist, p. 34).

Many whiners spend a lot of time complaining about this state of affairs for some reason, and unfortunately many Christians have accepted the idea that we should express our ingratitude with a similar attitude, but in the name of Jesus. - Doug Wilson

This is a great post on Zeal for Truth.

But ultimately, if believers simply went back to their bibles, they’d see that there is nothing “middle class” about Christianity. At all. It is radical in both belief and lifestyle. I don’t want to write or read that – because it is really challenging, and flies in the face of my own love for possessions and idols. Yet this is what my bible says. God is not seeking to make me more like like those in the world – he desire me to be more like his Son.

Dalrymple has an absolutely brilliant piece on the hazards of excessive sympathy for the poor, particularly when applied to politics.

To sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to combine all three errors.

No subject provokes the deformations of sympathy more than poverty. I recalled this recently when asked to speak on a panel about child poverty in Britain in the wake of the economic and financial crisis. I said that the crisis had not affected the problem of child poverty in any fundamental way. Britain remained what it had long been—one of the worst countries in the Western world in which to grow up.
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My remarks were poorly received by the audience, which consisted of professional alleviators of the effects of social pathology, such as social workers and child psychologists. One fellow panelist ... dismissed my comments as nonsense. For her, poverty was simply the “maldistribution of resources”; we could thus distribute it away. And in her own terms, she was right, for her charity stipulated that one was poor if one had an income of less than 60 percent of the median national income.

This definition, of course, has odd logical consequences: for example, that in a society of billionaires, multimillionaires would be poor. A society in which every single person grew richer could also be one in which poverty became more widespread than before; and one in which everybody grew poorer might be one in which there was less poverty than before. More important, however, is that the redistributionist way of thinking denies agency to the poor. By destroying people’s self-reliance, it encourages dependency and corruption—not only in Britain, but everywhere in the world where it is held.
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The British state is today as much a monopoly provider of education to the population as it is of health care. The monopoly is maintained because the government and the bureaucratic caste believe, first, that parents would otherwise be too feckless or impoverished to educate their children from their own means; and second, that public education equalizes the chances of children in an otherwise unequal society and is thus a means of engineering social justice.
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As in Tanzania, the state-dominated system became self-reinforcing. Because of the high taxation necessary to run it, it reduced the capacity and inclination of people to pay for their own choices—and eventually the habit of making such choices. The British state now decides the important things for British citizens when it comes to education and much else.
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The only time I ever saw [President] Nyerere in person was in Dodoma, the dusty town designated to become Tanzania’s new capital. He was expected to drive by, and by the side of the road sat a praise singer—a woman employed to sing the praises of important people. She was singing songs in praise of Nyerere, of which there were many, with words such as: “Father Nyerere, build and spread socialism throughout the country and eliminate all parasites.”

The great man drove past in a yellow Mercedes. The praise singer was covered in dust and started to cough.

This New York Times column shows why just throwing money at Third World poverty will continue to reap nothing but more poverty. It's even more true in the U.S. Many times, economic poverty is led by the nose ring of impoverishment of the soul. You can't cure the former without first fixing the latter.

Okay, before you get out your pitchforks and start screaming "racist" at me, read the rest of this post and the accompanying links.

This week, Rand Paul, son of libertarian 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul, was selected as the Republican candidate for the Kentucky Senate race. Then he made the "mistake" of going on MSNBC (guess he doesn't mind talking to five liberals and a box of rocks... er, Rachel Maddow). During the interview, the topic of racial segregation, federal powers, and the Civil Rights Act surfaced. His comments that followed have stirred up some significant debate throughout the media and blogosphere. For a good defense of Paul's line of thought, go here; particularly check out what John Stossel had to say. Another such discussion can be found over at Denny Burk's blog. Now I'm not a libertarian per se (libertarians tend to go overboard in their pursuit of a logically consistent ideology), but I do occasionally play one on the internets, and so I found myself defending Rand Paul's comments to Burk and several other commenters there who couldn't look past their initial emotional revulsion to actually consider the veracity of Paul's argument. I made the following comment:

The same logic that supports the complete criminalization of racially segregated groups supports the banning of Christian groups that won’t accept unrepentant homosexuals. So those who don’t like what Rand Paul says here can only blame themselves when Christian student groups on campuses across America are shut down because of their membership requirements.

Not terribly eloquent, but pretty much to the point. But then Doug Wilson got my back, elucidating that which I had so quickly stated.

The other night Rand Paul was chosen to be the Republican candidate for the Senate in Kentucky, and how long did it take for charges of racism to surface? What? Thirty seconds?

This was all on the basis of Paul's opposition to certain portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. And since the lighting here in the 1964 Civil Rights Act Official Shrine is composed entirely of flickering candles, it is terribly difficult to read. So we have gotten by for the last fifty years by chanting racially sensitive slogans to one another. But it turns out that sensitive slogans do not constitute a real education.

There are different issues involved. One is the difference between federal, state and local governments, and the meaning of our constitutional arrangement. Just because a law requiring x,y,z might be good and desirable does not mean that a federal law requiring x,y,z is good and desirable. Second, there is a stark difference between public and private, a distinction that Paul tried in vain to explain to Rachel Maddow. "These are strange words, Dr. Paul. What do they mean? Doesn't the government own everything?" And the third point is related to the second, and it is one that I like to think is in my wheelhouse. What is it? Everybody, all together now -- there is a difference between sins and crimes.

Suppose someone decides not to invite someone else to his birthday party. Could that be a sin? Sure. Suppose that someone refused to invite someone else to their birthday party for no other reason than the color of that person's skin. Is that a sin? Again, sure. Now, should the fellow who failed to invite someone to his birthday party (sinfully, remember) be fined, flogged, imprisoned, or executed for it? In other words, should his churlish behavior be a crime? "Of course not," I would say, followed up with "are you crazy?"

Why not? Because there is a difference between sins and crimes. It is a radical difference. Abortion should be against the law because God said to Moses on Sinai that we were not permitted to murder, and because He assigned civil penalties to violations of this law. Racial prejudice in the private sphere should not be against the law. God never assigned a civil penalty to it. Now, before anybody starts screaming, refusing to make something illegal (like racial bigotry) does not constitute indifference to whatever sin or immorality may be involved. Coveting the neighbor's lawnmower is a sin. Should it be a crime? Eating way too many apple fritters is a sin. Should it be a crime? Lusting after the cutest girl in the high school is a sin. Should it be a crime?
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Rand Paul was absolutely correct that all publicly owned and operated spheres had an obligation to be color blind, and those aspects of the Civil Rights Act that addressed this were not confusing sins and crimes -- although the federal issues are still there. But at least that did not muddle sins and crimes. And muddling sins and crimes is about all we do in public discourse anymore, and it is one of our chief intellectual shortcomings. Christians are included in this indictment.

In short, when contemporary Christians complain about political correctness run amok, when they complain about sodomy being declared a civil right such that their pious Aunt Matilda had to rent her duplex out to homos, when they complain about the intrusiveness of an incompetent gummint into absolutely everything, they need to trace the poison back to the source. They need to stop condemning the poison while praising the great wisdom of the poison pot. {emphasis added}

You want me to genuflect in the Shrine of the 1964 Civil Rights Act? Not going to do it, and while I am here I will put out as many of the candles as I can. Nobody's reading anyway. Might as well all sit in the dark. The chanted slogans sound more impressive and spiritual -- almost Benedictine -- that way. Spooky almost.

Wilson nails it in that penultimate paragraph; if private citizens cannot choose their company(no matter how loathsome the reasons for that choice may be), then Christians should not be surprised when the Gestapo stop at their door next. Knock, knock.

Doug Wilson gives some brilliant yet basic (but rarely understood) economic lessons this morning.

[I]t is time to resort to some moral philosophy, and discussion of the seven deadly sins. And in societies like ours, envy is among the deadliest. It is the stealth killer. How many sermons have you heard on this sin in the course of your lifetime? Why is it assiduously ignored?

But there is another factor in this. God is not mocked and a man reaps what he sows. Because we do so poorly at reading the narrative we are in, because we don't see the events in chapter 10 following from the events in chapter 3, we fail to see how envy destroys the envious. We don't run the thread out far enough.

Here is just one example. Whenever you see public complaints that corporations and businesses "don't pay taxes," you can be assured that envy has done its deadly work. And what happens if everyone is persuaded, and Congress fixes everything by passing a law? (Where would we be if Congress didn't fix things for us?) Now, do corporations and businesses now pay taxes?

No, the only thing we have done is make these corporations and businesses collectors of taxes, on behalf of the government. From whom do they collect them? Why, from John Q. Envy, who now pays higher prices at, say, the gas pump.

No business ever paid a tax. Businesses adjust their prices according to overhead, and when the public clamors to have that overhead raised, that sometimes happens. The overhead is raised. And when this happens, the business makes its adjustments, collects the new money from the saps at large, and passes that money on to the government. And, the saps mutter in satisfaction, at least greedy gusses at OilCo are paying their fair share now.

But wait, there's more. Now that we have insisted that the corporations, businesses, and the government put their heads together in the collection of our taxes (we didn't know that that was what we were doing, but envious people know very little), we cannot be surprised that the relationships up there in the macro-managerial class manifest an ever-increasing coziness. An outrage, we cry! Make them do it more!

Envy is the driving engine of economic follies.

This is the best analysis of the health care reform issue I've seen yet. Absolutely brilliant... now if only I could vote for him.



[HT: Zeal for Truth]

Here's an interesting piece on higher education and its possibly imminent demise.

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. Here's how I'm looking at it.

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
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By emphasizing mass and sameness and rankings, colleges have changed their mission.

This works great in an industrial economy where we can't churn out standardized students fast enough and where the demand is huge because the premium earned by a college grad dwarfs the cost. But...

2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won't get fooled again...
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3. The definition of 'best' is under siege.

Why do colleges send millions (!) of undifferentiated pieces of junk mail to high school students now? We will waive the admission fee! We have a one page application! Apply! This is some of the most amateur and bland direct mail I've ever seen. Why do it?

Biggest reason: So the schools can reject more applicants. The more applicants they reject, the higher they rank in US News and other rankings. And thus the rush to game the rankings continues, which is a sign that the marketers in question (the colleges) are getting desperate for more than their fair share. Why bother making your education more useful if you can more easily make it appear to be more useful?

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

College wasn't originally designed to merely be a continuation of high school (but with more binge drinking). In many places, though, that's what it has become. The data I'm seeing shows that a degree (from one of those famous schools, with or without a football team) doesn't translate into significantly better career opportunities, a better job or more happiness than a degree from a cheaper institution.

5. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

Just as we're watching the disintegration of old-school marketers with mass market products, I think we're about to see significant cracks in old-school schools with mass market degrees.
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The solutions are obvious... there are tons of ways to get a cheap, liberal education, one that exposes you to the world, permits you to have significant interactions with people who matter and to learn to make a difference. Most of these ways, though, aren't heavily marketed nor do they involve going to a tradition-steeped two-hundred-year old institution with a wrestling team. Things like gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after high school are opening doors for students who are eager to discover the new.